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The map of Szirakasz - A fictional contry with a real world location

Hello!

I am Eldelion, and I am seeking some advice about my first map.

The map is going to be used in a fantasy themed summer camp I'm organizing for children. The camp's concept is that the participants take the roles of the citizens of the country of Szirakasz (pronounced as Siracas): They become wizards, knights, merchants, blacksmiths or even the king. The kingdom then faces inner and outer threats.

This map will be used in the merchant's metagame. It depicts Szirakasz and it's regions (the blue area), the roads the caravans can take and some of the surrounding areas.

I want to make a fantasy styled map, on which the children may find the places where they have been, or can even be used to find new to explore.
The fantasy styled maps usually use small trees and mountains to represent terrain. In this case, since the whole area is covered with mountains and forests this method would be rather misleading.

Currently I'm thinking about drawing Risk-like regions, and the mountains will be represented with lines connecting areas of the same height.
I still don't know if I should (and if, then how) draw trees, and how will I get that handdrawn-on-old-paper look. Any advice would be appreciated.
I got the contour lines from a scanlation of a tourist map. Does anyone know of an easy way to vectorise it, and get smooth, continuous lines? While this is useable, I want thinner lines, but when I mess in Photoshop with it the lines get broken.

I think this is a really neat idea! Without offering any specific advice I would advise you check out the different tutorials on this site as they will likely be able to answer a number of questions pretty well. In all likelyhood if you want to use vectors you may need to just redraw your map in a program that deals with vectors such as illustrator or inkscape (which is free to download) A lot of people just use photoshop for everything and make sure the resolution is high enough to allow for sufficient smoothness. Rasterized (pixelated art as opposed to vector art) has its limitations. For example, if you make a rasterized map intended for printing you will want to make sure to set the image at 300 dpi before starting work or it won't print well. One way to get that paper feel in photoshop is to get a large parchment image and lay it under or over your drawn lines with low opacity or some sort of blending option. There are several ways to do it and you'd need to do some experimentation to get what you want.

Thanks for the advice, but after looking through a few tutorials it doesn't seam possible to automatically get continous lines from the raster lines - live traceing programs make fills instead of the lines I need.
I put together what I have writen about in the first post. While it doesn't look bad, it is still kind of empty... I am trying to come up with something to fill the empty spaces.

Added border, made regions in the uninhabited areas (not that logical, but it looks much better), added roads and shadows to the mountains.
All that remains are the texts and coming up with a way to make the city of Szirakasz (in the center of the kingdom of Szirakasz) stand out.

I have added the texts, but i think I still need to tweek them a bit - they simply dosen't feel like they belong where they are as much as on your maps, but I can't tell, what I should do. Maybe I only need a little sleep
The crest at the middle is still unfinished.